Our 2023 Recommended Summer Reads – Storage and OpenZFS

OpenZFS Summer Reads

With summer in full swing, there has never been a better time to improve your understanding of ZFS. For your summer reading pleasure we have compiled a set of articles that explore the fundamentals of OpenZFS and help you get started with the last word in filesystems.

OpenZFS – What Makes OpenZFS the Ideal Storage Solution for University Environments

OpenZFS is a cost-effective open source storage solution for Educational institutions. Learn how universities & system administrators can maximize its benefits.

FreeBSD and ZFS Holiday Reads – 2022 Edition

FreeBSD and ZFS Holiday Reads

If you’re getting ready to close the year, we’ve got you covered with some of the best content that we put out in the past year. Check out our top ZFS and FreeBSD content from 2022 and go down the open source rabbit hole for the holidays!

FreeBSD vs. Linux – Which Operating System to use for OpenZFS

FreeBSD vs. Linux - OpenZFS

Age-old discussion: ZFS running on Linux or FreeBSD? We’re not going to set out to tell you which operating system you should use. Both choices are excellent — but we’ll lay out how different (or alike) it is to run OpenZFS on either to help anyone on the fence decide which OS to use beneath our favorite filesystem.

httm – The Hot Tub Time Machine is Your ZFS Turn-Back-Time Method

You may already know how powerful ZFS snapshots are at enabling simple recovery from accidentally or maliciously deletion or corruption of files, but with a tool like Hot Tub Time Machine (HTTM) you can manage this on a per file basis even more easily. Enabling self-service restoration can reduce the load on your IT team, and HTTM even works on machines that do not use ZFS, as long as they are backed up to ZFS.

5 Key Reasons to Consider Open Source Storage Over Commercial Offerings

Open Source Storage

Although easy to overlook, storage is the most fundamental part of any computing project—without storage, there is neither code nor data! The right storage solution should be accessible, reliable, easy to maintain, and free from vendor lock-in. In this article, we examine some of the reasons that open source software is a natural fit for this crucial component.

Part 2: Tuning Your FreeBSD Configuration for Your NAS

FreeBSD and OpenZFS

Building your own NAS isn’t just about having the right storage configuration. It starts with the right hardware, the right OS setup, and finally going through the right choice for your storage – OpenZFS. In this edition of our 4-part article series on how to build your own NAS we discuss about fine tuning your FreeBSD OS for excellent NAS performance.

Tuning recordsize in OpenZFS

For many people, tuning OpenZFS isn’t really necessary—performance on the conservative default settings is more than ample to get what they need done.

However, To get the best performance, matching the recordsize to your application provides a large performance boost. Learn how to match your dataset to your workload.

Should I Upgrade to OpenZFS 2.1?

Beginning with version 13.0, FreeBSD supports the long-anticipated OpenZFS native encryption. If you’ve used FreeBSD’s GELI encryption in the past, you may wonder if switching to OpenZFS native encryption makes sense.

Check out the differences between GELI encryption and OpenZFS native encryption, and the main benefits of native encryption, let’s take a look at how to create an encrypted database and reroot to an encrypted database.

NFS Shares with ZFS

Why would you use the sharenfs property for NFS configuration and how to do so? FreeBSD’s built-in integration of OpenZFS and NFS makes it easy for any administrator to configure and manage NFS shares. By using OpenZFS’ sharenfs property, managing NFS shares can be added to your arsenal of scripts and procedures for monitoring and maintaining the data stored on OpenZFS filesystems.